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Arcana Academy Embraces Work from Home with New Rituals

Jessica Darke, Producer

Arcana Academy is an advertising agency ripe with tradition, ritual, and a sense of community. To keep our agency morale and productivity levels as high as pre-corona times, we have implemented the following rituals.

1. Daily Agency Status Meetings
In lieu of our giant status board and in-person conversations about the state of the Agency, we are dialing-in and checking-in with each other at the start of each workday. This ritual creates a sense of normalcy, structure, and a set of daily tasks. This simple act of checking-in arms each of us with a sense of purpose, belonging, and we are less likely to fall victim to the isolation blues. In typical, Arcana fashion, there is almost always a reason to laugh.

2. Collaborative Editing
This is a tool we have been using with clients and agency partners for years, but have recently begun to implement more for inter-agency work. Collaborative editing in the cloud (Zoom, Sharepoint, Google Drive) mimics our typical agency behavior of sitting around a conference room table and all looking at the same document projected on a large screen. Each person can hone-in on the document and focus in unison. If you squint real hard, you can almost see your co-workers in your periphery. Ok, not really, but it's fun to pretend.

3. Weekly Happy Hour via FaceTime
Each Friday at 4PM, we come together, pour a drink, raise a glass, and toast to the week or some movie quote.
This last week, we all logged into FaceTime, poured our glasses, and toasted, "There is no place like home!". We gave each other virtual tours of our homes. Think cribs meets your first-grade show & tell. We laughed, put on different hats, and poured ourselves another.

4. The Arcane
In addition to staying in touch with regard to work, we are also making sure to check in with each other on an emotional, intellectual, and human level. We continue to share conspiracy theories, scientific theories, and our own theories about geo-politics, Tiger King, and the latest TikTok.

As we continue #WFH, we will further optimize and enhance our ability to stay connected and thrive as a united front of creatives, account directors, project managers, producers, and technical staff.

Arcana Academy is an advertising agency in Los Angeles, California. We are open and operating at full capacity.

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